As the work at Stax sputtered and stalled, the music industry in Memphis began circling the drain. “One thing about the banks and the general business community in Memphis, none of those people understood anything about the music business or about the value of a company like Stax to Memphis,” says John Fry, owner of Ardent Studios, where Isaac Hayes and the Staple Singers recorded hits, and many Stax artists worked regularly. “The effect of Stax closing was profound and it was widespread. A lot of vendors—studios, photographers, graphic designers, printers, manufacturers, you name it—depended on Stax as a major customer. Many people had to leave town to find work in the industry.” Memphis survived as a home for recording studios but not for record labels. There have been start-ups and pop-ups, with forecasts for old school vigor occasionally wafting through. But since Stax’s fall, things ain’t like what was.
Under Bill Matthews, Union Planters National Bank earned record profits. But by 1984 the bank was again on the skids, and he was relieved of duties that autumn. He joined a cattle-breeding operation, traveling the world selling bull semen and frozen cattle embryos. “He used to say,” says guitarist and computer whiz Rick Ireland, “‘The banking business is becoming these bits of ones and zeros flying through the sky, and all we want to do is grab some of them every once in a while and then we’ll be rich.’” Matthews joined a credit-card processing facility in Arkansas, but it was underfunded and dissolved under a shady cloud. He moved to California, where he died of a heart attack in 1994, age sixty-one.
Money continued to stick to Johnny Baylor. He spent much of the 1970s in New York rather than in Memphis. Two of his associates, in interviews separated by months and without prompting in either case, each described a drawer full of hundred-dollar bills in Johnny’s bedroom.
Dino Woodard received his BA in 1984, when he was well into his 40s, and the year after Baylor’s 1987 death, he was licensed to preach the Gospel, soon receiving his Master of Divinity. Presently “Reverend Boom” is a minister at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where he’s an assistant to the pastor and leads services. Of his late friend he says, “Johnny Baylor, he was a believer. He believed that what he did he had to do to make it in the world. And he made a way for himself.” Dino officiated at Baylor’s funeral. Luther Ingram died in 2007 from complications related to diabetes.
The Staple Singers maintained an active career through the death of Pops Staples in 2000. In the latter 2000s, Mavis has released compelling albums with Jeff Tweedy and Ry Cooder. The Emotions joined Johnny Taylor at Columbia, and had several big disco hits including the number-one hit “Best of My Love.”
Rufus Thomas billed himself as “the World’s Oldest Teenager” and “the Funkiest Man Alive.” When he’d arrived in Memphis, he couldn’t drink out of the same water fountain as white people, and before he died in 2001, the city gave him the only dedicated parking spot on historic Beale Street and named a street for him. In Porretta Terme, Italy, home of the annual Porretta Soul Festival, there’s a park named for him. Until he died in 2001, he continued to host a radio show on WDIA.
In 2009, Booker T. Jones returned to solo recording, first making a hard-rock guitar album, Potato Hole, in collaboration with the Drive-By Truckers and Neil Young, and then the groove-heavy Road from Memphis, collaborating with the Roots. The one-time newspaper delivery kid was sought by the White House as a musical director in 2013. Recently, he’s signed to Concord’s Stax Records.
Steve Cropper has made two albums with Felix Cavaliere, vocalist and songwriter from the Rascals (Nudge It Up a Notch and Midnight Flyer). In 2011, he released a tribute to Lowman Pauling and the Five Royales, the group that so influenced his playing. On Dedicated, his guitar licks have a foot in the past, a foot in the present, and both feet on the dance floor.
Al Jackson’s murder has never been solved. One of the suspects, a man on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, was killed in a 1976 police shoot-out in Seattle; another passed a polygraph test and was dropped by police.
Andrew Love played the sax solo on Nicolette Larson’s “Lotta Love,” and Wayne brought Memphis to Peter Gabriel’s soulful “Sledgehammer.” (“I hung up the phone,” Wayne says, “and asked my daughter, ‘You ever heard of Peter Gabriels?’”) Wayne still keeps his trumpet handy, recently reprising Otis Redding’s “Happy Song” with Frazey Ford. He is an enthusiastic supporter of the Stax Music Academy, where he devotes time to teaching and inspiring young kids. “It had been loose and not that professional, what we had done,” says Wayne. “But those records stand up today. The door opened, the wind blew in, and we were smart enough not to fight it.”
Saxophonist Floyd Newman, long a first-call Memphis horn player, retired from the Memphis schools’ band program and still takes to the stage blowing real soul through twisted brass; lately, he’s been featured in the Bo-Keys, a soul band that mixes several younger players with their heroes, including Skip Pitts, Howard Grimes, William Bell, Willie Hall, Ben Cauley, and Archie “Hubby” Turner (from Hi Records).
When the bad winds began to blow, Deanie Parker completed her Master’s of Public Administration degree through night courses. “I have to say that the majority of Stax employees, who I think had a great deal to offer Memphis, were blackballed in the work community,” she says. When she was hired at the city’s first independent television station, it was because, she says, “the manager was not a Memphian. He didn’t judge me by the color of my skin. He judged me based on my character and my abilities.” After Stax, Larry Shaw established the South’s first African-American-owned, full-service advertising agency, the Shaw Group, and later a marketing and communications consulting firm. He passed away in 2003 after a career of positive imaging.
Stax “was one hell of a great company,” says Stax’s mastering engineer Larry Nix, even though it closed owing him thousands of dollars. “When they say ‘Stax family,’ it wasn’t just words. When my son was born, they bought him a really nice baby bed, they inquired about his health. They were interested in us. I made lifetime friendships. It was so fun, you had to sometimes make yourself go home—afraid you’d miss something.” After the Mar-Keys, Larry’s brother Don Nix continued to do it the storybook way. He wrote a few hits, including “Going Down,” and produced a number of albums. Every big check that came in, he bought another huge item. Beautiful houses, three Rolls-Royces, trips to faraway places. Those opulent items are gone now, but the royalties keep him in bologna and on the edge of trouble, a safe distance between himself and nine-to-five work.
Little Milton continued having hits with Malaco Records in Jackson, Mississippi. Bar-Kays producer Allen Jones helped develop a Stax act named Con Funk Shun, and one of its members, Felton Pilate, was MC Hammer’s music director while the star was at the top. When hip-hop stars Jay-Z and Kanye West collaborated, they built their new ideas around samples from Otis Redding’s “Try A Little Tenderness,” which sounded as fresh in 2011 as it had four decades earlier.
Eddie Floyd, William Bell, Albert King, and Wilson Pickett all enjoyed successful gigging and recording careers. If their popularity never surpassed what they achieved at Stax, it seemed to almost never wane either. Each continued to work as long as he wanted, drawing crowds with older hits, entertaining them with newer material. “Stax gave me a career,” says Eddie. “It’s that music, you know? Once you’re part of that music, it’s till you die.” He laughs. “It’s just simple as that.”
Estelle Axton. (Doris Axton Fredrick Collection)
“Somebody asked me what I tell people who come in with a tape,” Estelle says, “people who just know they’re the greatest songwriter in the world. I never turn anybody off. If I know they don’t have any talent, I suspect they know they don’t either. I ask them, ‘Do you enjoy putting together these tapes? I know it costs you money.’ If they say yes, then I say, ‘Keep doing it, because the money you spend there, the psychiatrist won’t get it.’ It’s a release, people do it for their own pleasure. They’ll never be able to place a song, but for their own well-being they do something they like to do. A lot of things, you’re not going to reap any rewards for. If you enjoy doing it, keep on doing it. That’s what I tell them.”